It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do. There is no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to do. Wasting time is merely an occupation then, and a most exhausting one. Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen. - Jerome K. Jerome

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Realize what I mean by that: I didn’t decide to become a Christian; it just happened. As a child, if someone you respect tells you that something is true — or even just illustrates that they believe it to be true — it becomes absolute. This is something that people don’t realize. There is no choice in these matters for a human until much later in life.

The place was more segregated than anything I’d ever seen. Everyone disagreed on where Jesus was buried, where this happened or that happened, and overall had their own dogmatic and exclusionary versions of how things “really” transpired.

I remember the moment it happened — the moment I realized I no longer believed.

I was reading a story about Moses going into a town to spread the word of God. The people of the town must have been Pagans or something because they wanted nothing of Moses’s teachings. They became quite terse with Moses, as I remember, and invoked the anger of God.

In a fit of rage, God proceeded to set fire to the town.

As I was reading this, with all of these doubts and questions in my mind already, I was dumbfounded. Setting fire to a town? A town full of humans he created? Was he surprised at their non-belief? How could he be if he created each one of them from scratch as an omnipotent and omniscient being? Wouldn’t he have had to create the very “flaw” within them that gave them the option to choose incorrectly? If not, how did it get there without his knowledge? What part of any of this was outside of God’s control.

Nothing. Nothing is outside the control of an all-powerful and all-knowing God.

Moses ended up negotiating for the people who’s town was being destroyed by God. He begged and pleaded that they didn’t know any better, and that they should be sparred. God finally listened to Moses and stopped his attack (praise God).

That was it for me. I put the book down and have been an atheist ever since.

Whosoever shall work in the Sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death.— Numbers 15:32

But millions of Christians and Jews work on the Sabbath and think it’s just fine. Why? Because they’ve justified — using their own morality — that no just God would really condone killing people for such a thing, right? Well, here’s the simple question: what gives regular men the right to deny the parts of the Bible that they see fit? What tells them to pick and choose what to follow and what to discard?

The answer is nothing. Nothing tells them it’s permissible to ignore the exact words of the ten commandments if at some future time the laws don’t permit their enforcement. Let me state this again: God commanded Moses to kill a man for gathering firewood on the Sabbath. The man was killed. There is nothing about this that expired or became obsolete due to later law. If you are a Christian or a Jew, and you work on the Sabbath, you are breaking God’s law in a way that God himself says is punishable by death.

And that’s my point. You, my fellow humans out there who know this is a hideous idea but cling to a Christian identity are fooling yourselves. You are moral because YOU are a good person. You are moral because you don’t kill people who check their work email on Sunday. You decide how your family follows the Bible. You decide the moral way to raise your family.

You think your goodness comes from the Bible, but it doesn’t. It was inspired by the Bible, and you enjoy the idea of the Bible, but that idea is actually your own version of it — not the real thing. If it were the real thing you’d be in jail right now. The same goes for Muslims, as the Koran commands unspeakable evil as well of its followers. In short, if you’re open, thoughtful and moderate then you’ve perverted the original teachings of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam by being so.

The Google product guru used his keynote to describe some of the corporate culture within his notoriously secretive company, illustrating ways to encourage employee innovation in much the same spirit that SaaS adoption needs to be encouraged.

Most firms tend to put barriers up when it comes to employee innovation, he stated, though Google does not. "There's no penalty for failure [at Google]," he said. "In fact, we encourage it, because, if you're not failing, then you're probably not trying hard enough."

Describing the Annual Budget meetings, Sorabjee goes on to say: "The audience in these meetings was drawn from industrialists, lawyers, businessmen and the common individual. Nani's speeches were fascinating for their brevity and clarity. His Budget speeches became so popular throughout India and the audience for them grew so large that bigger halls and later the Brabourne Stadium in Bombay had to be booked to keep pace with the demand of an audience of over 20,000. It was aptly said that in those days that there were two Budget speeches, one by the Finance Minister and the other by Nani Palkhivala, and Palkhivala's speech was undoubtedly the more popular and sought after."

Yes, for example, there is a growing student movement, on minimum wage.

The students in the Stanford Labor Action Coalition are working with a national union to pressure Stanford to improve the lot of janitors, cooks, maintenance workers and other blue-collar employees who work on campus, some for as little as $8.50 an hour, less than $18,000 a year.

2. Assign local representatives to tag/track every policeman in that area.

3. Make these locally electable positions. Not appointments. Self governance. Why have democracy at the top level, if our people don't know how it is going to work locally? Make school principals/teachers locally electable too. These guys pay lotsa money in bribes to get a job, they might as well spend it on getting elected.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Draper, Kotas and a group of developers have spent months coding en2ools, a set of technologies that accelerates access to content, and creates bridges between devices and entertainment like music and films, allowing people to use content meant for a single device on dozens of different gadgets."Portability is what people want," Kotas says. "But with the big companies at war with each other, you'll never see iTunes on Yahoo or movies on Google. En2ools are the bridge that will let you listen to iTunes and iRadio on your Nokia phone. We make our money by inserting ourselves into the deal between the provider and the user."

Apparently, the Peruvian government is considering a bill mandating open-source software for all public bureaux. From the congressman's letter, we gather that MS had circulated a FUD communiqué calculated to frighten world + dog with images of collapsing domestic software markets, spiraling costs and systems migration nightmares. Villanueva Nuñez slices and dices with great skill to reveal the internal inconsistencies, unsupportable claims and irrational conclusions which the MS flacks trade in.

The letter provides the most thoughtful and thorough rebuttal we've ever seen to Microsoft's standard open-source terror boilerplate.

Jazz is an IBM Rational project to build a scalable, extensible team collaboration platform for integrating work across the phases of the development lifecycle. We believe Jazz will help teams build software more effectively while making the software development activity more productive and enjoyable.

Try to understand where they are coming from. People absolutely hate to be wrong or feel stupid. While you may not agree with them, try to empathize first. From a decade and a half of very successful professional sales experience and dealing with tens of thousands of people, I can tell you without a doubt that it is better to start out by saying "I understand your concern" or "help me understand how you feel" (as in, "I understand your concern, help you understand how you feel that bringing the troops home to be with their families means Dr. Paul doesn't support them" or "I understand your concern about whether or not Ron Paul is a Real Republican, but help me understand how someone who has been a Republican for 30 years, and a libertarian for one yeartwo decades ago isn't really a Republican" or "help me understand how you feel that bringing our troops home from all over the world and back to the United States would make us less safe or bringing our National Guard home would hurt our National defense" or "I understand your concern that we need to win the war, but help me understand how we will know when we have actually won? Didn't President Bush declare 'Mission Accomplished' a few years ago? Please help me understand" than it is to start out saying "You are an idiot and your apathy and mindless following are destroying our country."

Availability of these patents will encourage researchers, entrepreneurs and companies of all sizes in any industry to create, apply, and further develop their consumer or industrial products, processes, and services in a way that will help to protect and respect the environment.

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) -- named today by IFI Claims as the leading earner of United States patents for the 15th consecutive year -- are initiating this effort in partnership with Nokia, Pitney Bowes, and Sony. The pledged portfolio, dubbed the "Eco-Patent Commons," is available on a dedicated, public Web site hosted by the WBCSD (http://www.wbcsd.org/web/epc).

Patents pledged to the Eco-Patent Commons -- originally proposed at IBM's Global Innovation Outlook conference -- feature innovations focused on environmental matters and innovations in manufacturing or business processes where the solution provides an environmental benefit. For example, a company may pledge a patent for a manufacturing process that reduces hazardous waste generation, or energy or water consumption. A pledged patent covering a procurement or logistics solution may reduce fuel consumption.

Examples of the environmental benefits expected for pledged patents include:

"I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the armed forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God."

This is very similar to Islam, all muslims pledge allegiance to Saudi Arabia. Islam is global, US is local.

And that seems to be a problem we’re creating for ourselves — we’re only thinking about getting the data online, not about what to do next. Or about what else could we do with our data. Or what could someone else do with it if we let them. We’re content with a couple of search boxes, a button and a results page. And we’re content to leave it right where we put it.

Repeat customers: A lot has been written about the traffic these database sites get. But I want to see what the traffic is like months after it first goes up. What’s the traffic like after the third or fourth update. The reason I ask is because some of these search apps to me seem like a pure voyeur play. What I mean by that is the user sees a salary database, goes and looks up their neighbor and … what? They’re done. They’ve answered the one question they wanted to ask. How are you bringing people back to your data?

Shaky business model: Are we really building a business model, or even a component of a business model, around making public data searchable? Because guess what? Google is too. That’s right. The search giant is dealing directly with government agencies to help them make their own data searchable. Sound familiar? Think your data ghetto can compete with Google? Do you think people are going to remember your newspaper.com url over Google? Really?

The acacias and a species of ant that colonize them live together in an arrangement called mutualism. The ants nest in the trees’ thorns and sip on their nectar; in return, they swarm out ferociously, ready to bite, when a tree is disturbed by an elephant, a giraffe or other grazing animal.

But somehow, Dr. Palmer said, the trees seem to sense when no one is munching on their leaves and, after a year or so, seemingly decide, “We are going to reduce our investment in ants” by not producing so many roomy thorns or so much tasty nectar. The ants’ responses — lassitude is one — eventually encourage wood-boring beetles to invade the trees. Soon their tunnels leave the trees sickly, dying or dead.

The finding shows that what looks like two-species mutualism may involve other species. And they offer new proof of the fragility of the web of life, a phenomenon observed, for example, when wolves vanish from mountain landscapes or sharks and other top marine predators are fished out of the marine food chain.

Without wolf predation, elk are freer to roam and eat more plants. Result: aspen begin to vanish. Similarly, the overfishing of sharks and similar large fish leave smaller, algae-eating fish free to graze unhindered on algae growing on (and feeding) coral. Result: dead coral.

We then met up with the Google Health folks, and saw some really cool technology that I wish I could talk about. While I think there was a little bit of “magical thinking” about how their technology will work, in general there was a number of excellent innovative ideas in what we saw. We also got a personal tour from Leslie, met up with a number of the engineers on the campus, raided the schwag closet, and did some planning for some future surprises for our community.

EnterpriseDB takes PostgreSQL, modifies it a bit with its own secret sauce to make it" Oracle-compatible"

rPath have paved the way to easy virtual appliances with their rBuilder technology and rPath Appliance program. You can even take rBuilder for a spin online to create your own virtual appliance foundation.

In 2006, advertisers spent $16.9 billion online, up steadily each year from $6 billion in 2002, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau. In the first half of 2007, online advertising reached nearly $10 billion, a nearly 27 percent increase over the first half of 2006.

A powerful illustration of this flip-flopping comes when some powerful Congressman goes to the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan to chant, "God is Great" in Arabic. Imagine doing that today! And this is exactly what Ron Paul is decrying. He understands that the world is complex and changing, filled not with monoliths but nuance. He is too humble to profess to mete out perfect justice.

Max Raskin [send him mail] goes to high school in New Jersey. He was a summer fellow at the Mises Institute in 2007.

REITs pay no corporate income tax as long as they pay at least 90% of their income to shareholders as dividends. However, those REITs were owned by Wal-Mart subsidiaries based in Delaware and therefore owed no tax on the receipt of those dividends. The result: Wal-Mart turned rental payments to itself into state-deductible expenses, even though the money never left the company.

For a four-year period, the setup saved the retailer an estimated $230 million on its tax bill in dozens of states.

Verizon is the only web-based site where you can pay your bill faster by shipping out instead of paying online.

In my life, I've encountered a few sites that are unresponsive time and again. Two of them that are consistently excruciatingly slow are verizon and godaddy. Not so surprisingly, verizon works on internet explorer only. T-Mobile sucks some time too.

Verizon, an ISP, has a rather poor infrastructure. It takes several minutes for a page to load. I have to stop and refresh the page many times over to load correctly. It has crappy tabbing too, if I select something, it automatically goes to the next element.

Godaddy consistently gives me a bad header request error.

I use both sites a couple of times every month and they have been consistent in their crappy behavior.

This proves beyond a shadow of doubt that asp is not viable for traffic intensive sites.

I have no love the southern radicals any more than the northern, but in their defense, it was constant yankee carping that brought on those in your face comments about slavery.

As to Fort Sumter? It was a customs house. The war was about taxes. We were paying for the industrial revolution up north and had enough. We said no more. Lincoln decided to reinforce his tax collectors and we said enough. Up to that point, the yankee soldiers had been buying their provisions in the market in Charleston. No body bothered them. But that was too much. So we blasted 'em. They were trespassing in our harbor, and intercepting our commerce. That's brigandage under international law.

While the south was not blameless, the north turned it from a war of words into a ruthless and murderous invasion of private property. They fought like Nazis, we fought, for the most part, like gentlemen. One, exactly one, northern town was burned. Whole states were turned into wasteland down here. So yeah, we view them as monsters. And ourselves as victims. Why wouldn't we?

It must not be forgotten that Sherman and Sheridan were acting under orders when they carried torch and sword to the civilians of the south. They were promoted because other northern generals were Christians and would not fight that way. But Lincoln found his pyromaniacs...

And why do we need provocation to secede? In a voluntary union, we should be able to secede because we wake up in the morning and just plain feel like it! If you can't do that, you are not free. We have gone from chattel slavery to social slavery.